Does licensing increase the quality of services? This is a major unresolved question in the economic analysis of occupational licensing. This paper provides the first empirical evidence on the simultaneous relationship between anticompetitive effects and minimal quality standards. Using data on...

Despite six empirical studies published since 2000 designed to assess fund managers' REIT selection ability, their skill remains in question. Unlike previous studies, we examine fund holdings and trades of REITs to answer this question. This allows us to account for portfolio rebalancing that...

Because the assets held by publicly traded real estate companies are infrequently traded, their values must be estimated to determine the relationship between share prices and net asset values for investment purposes. Alternative modeling approaches may be followed to accomplish these...

This study documents the publicly traded equity Real Estate Investment Trust (REIT) universe during the modern REIT era (early 1990s through the present). We show the growth and consolidation of the industry, changes in property type focus, increases in institutional ownership, and the growth of...

Over the recent decade there was a wave of REITs going private, from an average of about three per year to forty between 2005 and 2007. Standard corporate finance theory posits that firms go private when there is no longer a positive tradeoff between the expected benefits and costs of being...

This is the first study to examine the post-earnings-announcement drift anomaly in a Real Estate Investment Trust (REIT) context. The efficient markets hypothesis suggests that unexpected earnings should be fully incorporated into asset prices soon after being publicly announced. We hypothesize...

We examine the pricing of volatility risk in the cross-section of equity Real Estate Investment Trust (REIT) stock returns over the 1996 – 2010 period. We consider both aggregate (systematic) volatility and firm-specific (idiosyncratic) volatility. In contrast to the negative and significant...

We examine the industry-level relation between the two dominant asset pricing anomalies, the continuation of past price movements (momentum) and the incomplete reaction to earnings news (post-earnings-announcement drift). With the former having long been established in REIT returns, and the...

Whether geographic diversification within property portfolios is ideal remains an open question, with most studies finding either a diversification discount or no evidence of benefits. Using a sample of equity real estate investment trusts (REITs) from 2010–2016, we find a nonlinear relation...

This paper examines the role of stock option programs and executive holdings of stock options in REIT governance. We study this issue by analyzing how the market reaction to a stock repurchase announcement varies as a function of the individual REIT's governance structure. In particular, we...